I accompanied a busful of fifth graders on a field trip to a super secret location yesterday, which is something I can do now that I'm unshackled.

It was lovely riding three to a seat. I think this is a good time to mention, we should be checking to make sure our children actually brush their teeth.

Anyway, I shepherded my little group of 2 girls and 4 boys around the place, making sure to hit the three MANDATORY exhibits while also keeping the children from either wandering into Lake Michigan or breaking off a souvenir piece of Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle, which every parent seems to think kids want to look at, but no one over the age of 5 ever does. (That's because they can't get close enough to peer inside or even listen to the recorded information on the headsets, because 38-year-old balding men with long greasy ponytails hanging down their backs are hogging it up. I wish I were making that scenario up, but I regret to say I am not.)

I took the kids to see the trains where a developmentally-disabled young man told me I was nice looking ("I don't want yer phone number or nuthin', but you are nice lookin'), which all the kids found monumentally more interesting than the elaborate, painstaking display of rail travel between Chicago and Seattle, proving once and for all that my beauty regimen of tucking my hair behind my ears and pulling a pair of jeans out of the laundry is finally starting to work for me.

Then I had my lunch out of a paper bag, and it wasn't even in bottle form this time. Afterwards, the boys went insane for some reason, got yelled at by a museum employee, we looked at some hatching chicks and some cloned mice without reading the accompanying wall-mounted plaques explaining about DNA and genetics, got back on the bus and came home.

Who wants to sign me up for a reality show?